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Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The tradition carries on in our new location with some soft baked cookies...

I think it is finally safe to say that we have found a house! After looking at a very large number of places, we made an offer a day or so ago and have been negotiating the final details. We all agreed on the deal yesterday and it looks to be a go! Of course, we still need to get the inspection out of the way, but if all goes well, we currently have a closing date of September 4th. That date is much sooner than we thought we would be able to get in, but we are glad we can get our belongings out of storage and into the new house!

It is probably a little further south than we were initially prepared for, but the house had only been on the market for 1 day(!) and we didn't want to waste any time. While I can't say that is holds my dream kitchen, it is workable - it was the rest of the house that sold it for us. It had a lot of the things both of us have always wanted, but never thought we could find and afford! I hope to get some pictures posted of the inside soon - it just depends on how smoothly the closing goes!

So it is Wednesday today.... I wonder if any of you are thinking if we did any baking for the Weekly Wednesday Treat Day? Well, guess what... we did! I was going to wait until we got into a house to start this up again, but I just couldn't wait that long - is that sad or what?! I did have to go out and buy a bunch of supplies just to bake these Soft Baked Butterscotch-Chocolate Chip Cookies though.

Since I don't have my mixer yet, I had to make sure whatever I made could be done in a simple bowl with a sturdy wooden spoon. It has been ages since I've done a cookie without a mixer, but it was dead easy and actually quite fun to mash the ingredients together. These golden rounds are for soft cookie lovers - while these cookies are not cake-like at all, they also have no crispness to them either. One thing I liked about these is you can bend 'em in the middle without the cookies falling apart - they have a slight chewy factor with a strong butterscotch undertone.

If you scan through the ingredient list, you may perk up when you get to the instant pudding ingredient - it may sound a little weird, but it gives the cookies a brilliant tenderness and backs up the flavor the butterscotch chips add. You also want to be sure and use a good tablespoon's worth of quality vanilla - I think the added dimension the vanilla brings is needed to keep the flavor of the butterscotch from being too overwhelming. You can play around with the butterscotch and chocolate chip amounts to suit your taste, but we both thought that this was just the right amount for these cookies. You could also toss a handful of toasted nuts into the dough, but in a soft cookie like this, we thought that the crunch would be too much of a distraction.

13 comments:

Congrats!! So glad to know that you found a house. Also again great recipe to try. It's on my list with the muffins. I'm just starting to get settle in the new house and should start my baking in the next day or so. I'll let you know how it goes. Can't wait to see the pics of the new house.

Yes Joe I can feel everything your feeling right now. I was gonna bake the Maple Butterscotch Macadamia Nut Blondies, but of course I had everything but the brown sugar. I guess in the next few weeks I'll be running at the grocery store all the time. I'll let you know when I bake these. Have a good night.